A gaming geek blog inspired by the grandiose science fiction imagery from games, comics, books, and popular culture.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Starship combat non-critical hit table

A lot of starship battle simulations ultimately boil down to a war of attrition: your phasers burning through the other guy's shields before his missles pierce your armor. However, many space combat games have some sort of critical hit system as well--either integral to the game mechanics, like the threshhold checks in Full Thrust, or bolted on as an afterthought like the Galactic Knights optional critical hit table. This is also known as the Golden BB rule--meaning a one-in-a-million lucky shot can get through and take out your flagship.

Most of the time, though, your shots simply amount to ticking off armor boxes or crossing off systems on your ship diagram. But there's more to a starship than gun emplacements, engines, and electronics. When I run my convention scenarios, I like to describe to the players what happens with the non-critical hits, or when someone takes out a cargo space on a transport. However, it's tough coming up with something on the fly, so I whipped up this table for future reference.

I'm a bit late to this party, but I've added my own version of the non-critical hits table here: http://colgar6.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/damage-control-to-disco-lounge.html . It's not quite the same as the original; I've added a number of items of my own.